“Brian, chill, we’re here with her. It’s just us. Hunter and Jackson left, and I sent Marvin and the other guys home. You can go to bed with a clear conscience.” Poppy and her blabbermouth. I still had fifty pages to go. I could finish them.
“What do you mean by that, Poppy? What would change if they were still here?”
Brian was always paranoid.
I have to study. My dad will kill me if I get another bad grade.
“Let’s go downstairs, Ari,” he addressed me unceremoniously. It was really hard to put up with Brian when he was in this kind of mood. For as much as he did to protect us, sometimes it felt suffocating.
“I’ll be back,” I whispered to the girls before leaving the room. They went back to their notes, and I followed Brian to the stairs.
There wasn’t another living soul there. I leaned against the Range Rover as he stared at me, bewildered. I put his doubts to rest by grabbing him by his T-shirt.
“Ari.”
“There’s nobody here,” I whispered before our lips met. Besides, we were making out on the sidewalk. I didn’t understand what the problem was. We’d been together for two years and other than a few kisses there was never anything else between us. He didn’t have any problems down there, I was sure of that, but he seemed to ignore all other more intimate aspects of our relationship. And I’d stopped trying because his rebuffs were too harsh. My hand grazed his chest. I felt his heart pounding under his T-shirt as I caressed it. My breath wavered expectantly, hoping for a miracle, like him tearing my dress off with his hands. But that never happened.
I licked his lower lip and softly bit it, and Brian raised an eyebrow, a little confused. His fingers gripped my hips. One, two, three seconds, then he pulled back.
Again.
Emboldened, I grabbed his hand and put it under my skirt.
“Not here,” he said, pulling away from me immediately.
“Not here, not in the car, not in your room, not at my house. You never want to anywhere!”
“I said not here.”
I clenched my jaw and pulled away.
He stopped me. Again. He was shattering my self-esteem for the millionth time.
“Why?” I asked.
Why was it that the only guy I liked didn’t want me? Why did all the other guys like me except for him?
He said he loved me, but he didn’t show it. And I couldn’t stand that. He never talked to me about it either. He avoided the subject like he was embarrassed. I could never have a serious conversation with him about it. I was always scared of saying the wrong thing and upsetting him. But now that pill was making me more neurotic. I couldn’t contain myself.
He turned away from me without even answering.
“Brian!”
He didn’t stop. He walked around the car. His action sparked an unpredictable reaction in me. I moved next to him and before he reached the card door, I pushed his back.
“Ari, what’s wrong with you?”
“Why?” I shouted, exasperated.
“What?”
“You never can!”
“What are you saying?”
He knew perfectly well what I was talking about.
“You don’t want me.”
